The Hackett Group and EquaTerra Announce Joint Offerings For Business Process Sourcing Services; Complementary Expertise Provide
October 25 2005 - 9:30AM
Business Wire
The Hackett Group, a global business process advisory firm and an
Answerthink company (NASDAQ: ANSR) and EquaTerra, a multi-national
outsourcing and insourcing advisory firm, today announced an
exclusive alliance designed to demonstrate how executives can
improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their business
functions through a blend of service delivery alternatives such as
shared services, offshoring, and outsourcing. The exclusive
alliance will be formally launched at Hackett's 2005 Business
Process Sourcing Conference, "Balancing Costs with Business
Effectiveness," in Atlanta on October 26th (tomorrow). The
companies will unveil jointly-managed Business Process Sourcing
Executive Advisory Programs for Human Resources and Finance
executives offering a tailored mix of benchmarking services,
on-demand advisor access, empirical research, and peer learning
opportunities. The combined membership of Hackett and EquaTerra
benchmarking services will launch with over 50 client companies,
including existing members of Hackett's Finance Shared Services
Advisory Program and EquaTerra's EQuation HRO Programs. The
combined capabilities, knowledge base, and intellectual property of
the two companies offers clients a comprehensive, objective, and
high-impact set of services. Offerings will incorporate Hackett's
best practices research in business process sourcing with
EquaTerra's in-depth experience in HR, F&A, Procurement, and IT
outsourcing performance and deal structure, gained through advisor
support of more than 600 global business transformation,
outsourcing, and outsourcing management projects. EquaTerra
Chairman Mark Hodges will present a keynote speech at Hackett's
Business Process Sourcing Conference at Atlanta's Grand Hyatt Hotel
on October 26, highlighting various service delivery alternatives
clients employ to balance costs with business effectiveness.
EquaTerra is the Marquis sponsor for this event, which will feature
presentations by executives from more than a dozen companies,
including Microsoft, NiSource, Dow Chemical, Delta Airlines,
America Online, and Accenture, discussing an array of Business
Process Sourcing topics. Hackett executives will also offer
valuable Business Process Sourcing performance metrics and insights
from The Hackett Group's 2005 Book of Numbers(C) research.
According to David Dungan, a Hackett officer and COO of parent
company Answerthink, "We have chosen to align with EquaTerra
because they understand the complexity of not just IT outsourcing,
but Business Process Outsourcing. What clients are learning in the
emerging area of BPO is that the interdependencies within process
groups such as cash disbursements or the revenue cycle are very
different from those when outsourcing your servers or data storage.
EquaTerra is the leading advisory firm in this area and has more
knowledge and experience than anyone else in the industry. They
have an impressive track record of helping companies make effective
sourcing decisions and negotiate sustainable outsourcing
relationships that are mutually beneficial to both the service
provider and client. "EquaTerra has demonstrated a clear
understanding of BPO evaluation, the service provider marketplace,
and what it takes to build and maintain a successful BPO
relationship," said Mr. Dungan. "Together, our joint offering will
deliver a unique solution assisting clients in any phase of
sourcing evaluation - pre-contract, contracting, or post-contract.
It will combine Hackett sourcing knowledge garnered from ongoing
benchmark studies and advisory programs with EquaTerra's
outsourcing advisory expertise." Mark Hodges, EquaTerra Chairman,
stated, "Sourcing decisions can have a tremendous impact on the
operations of a company. In order to evaluate the opportunity for
success in outsourcing, shared services, or other sourcing
alternatives, it is critical for companies to have detailed
baseline performance metrics. Having quantitative insight into
world-class performance metrics and a clear understanding of the
costs associated with the retained and outsourced components of an
end-to-end process is essential to sourcing decisions and ongoing
process management. This is clearly Hackett's area of expertise.
They have built an industry-leading empirical knowledge base of
what works and what doesn't in business processes. Mark Toon,
EquaTerra CEO also mentioned, "Our clients routinely utilize
Hackett's benchmarking and advisory services in order to streamline
their operations and cut costs, reduce overhead, and improve the
strategic value they provide. Through our collaboration, Hackett
and EquaTerra will synchronize our offerings in a complementary
fashion that allows our clients to more easily compare internal vs.
external service delivery alternatives before, during, and after a
contract is signed." According to Don Chappel, chief financial
officer of Williams, "We've worked individually with Hackett and
EquaTerra during the past few years. Each has a lot to offer
companies seeking to cut costs while improving effectiveness and
strategic alignment. And they both have strong capabilities in
helping companies optimize sourcing alternatives. Taken together,
the synergy of offerings and the breadth and depth of their
combined intellectual capital is exceptional." Hackett's research
shows that world-class companies use outsourcing strategically to
reduce cost in transaction-oriented areas. World-class HR
organizations allocate 26 percent more of their transactional
process costs to outsourcing than typical companies, helping them
reduce total costs in this area by 19 percent. About The Hackett
Group The Hackett Group (www.thehackettgroup.com), a business
process advisory firm and an Answerthink company, is a world leader
in best practice research, benchmarking and advisory services that
empower executives to achieve world-class enterprise performance.
Only The Hackett Group empirically defines world-class performance
in sales, general and administrative (SG&A) and supply chain
activities with analysis gained through 3,300 benchmark studies
over 13 years at nearly 2,000 of the world's leading companies. The
foundation of Hackett's benchmarks, transformation services, and
membership-based advisory programs is our proprietary database of
Hackett-Certified(SM) Practices, approaches which are proven to
correlate with superior performance metrics. This unparalleled
knowledge repository enables Hackett business advisors to provide
data, advice, and strategic insight with a level of integrity and
authority available nowhere else. As of this writing, Hackett
clients comprise 96 percent of the Dow Jones Industrials, 77
percent of the Fortune 100 and 92 percent of the Dow Jones Global
Titans Index. More information on The Hackett Group is available:
by phone at (770) 225-7300; by e-mail at info@thehackettgroup.com;
or on the Web at www.thehackettgroup.com. About EquaTerra EquaTerra
(www.equaterra.com) is focused solely on providing global
corporations with outsourcing and insourcing advisory, research and
governance services that enable them to achieve service delivery
excellence for their SG&A processes. EquaTerra's advisors
average more than 20 years of industry, service provider and
process experience with functional leadership in Finance &
Accounting, HR, IT and Procurement, and have been involved in over
600 global business transformation, outsourcing and outsourcing
governance projects. For more information, please contact Lee Ann
Moore at 713.669.9292; leeann.moore@equaterra.com;
www.equaterra.com. Hackett-Certified, Book of Numbers, and Hackett
World-Class Passport are service marks of The Hackett Group. This
press release contains "forward looking statements'' within the
meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and
involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors
that may cause Answerthink's actual results, performance or
achievements to be materially different from the results,
performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward
looking statements. Factors that impact such forward looking
statements include, among others, the ability of the products and
services mentioned in this release to deliver the desired effect,
our ability to effectively integrate acquisitions into our
operations, our ability to attract additional business, our ability
to effectively market and sell our recently launched y product
offerings and other new services including those mentioned in this
release, the timing of projects and the potential for contract
cancellations by our customers, changes in expectations regarding
the information technology industry, our ability to attract and
retain skilled employees, possible changes in collections of
accounts receivable, risks of competition, price and margin trends,
changes in general economic conditions and interest rates as well
as other risks detailed in the Company's Annual Report on Form 10-K
for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2004 filed with the
Securities and Exchange Commission. We undertake no obligation to
update or revise publicly any forward-looking statements, whether
as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.
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